


Border Crossings

by ignipes



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-07-17
Updated: 2006-07-17
Packaged: 2017-10-03 05:13:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam goes his own way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Border Crossings

A doe-eyed prostitute follows him down the street. Tiny slip of a girl, barely twelve years old, barefoot and smudged-faced, her shoulders are thin like knives under the straps of a blood-red dress that was made for somebody with actual hips and breasts.

Her voice carries over the blaring horns and rattling carts, barking dogs and shouting shopkeepers: "Please sir, thank you? You want, sir, please? Mister, thank you, you come this way, please?"

She trails him for six blocks, never more than twenty paces behind.

Halfway down the seventh block Sam stops abruptly and jams his hand into his pocket, pulls out a fistful of tattered bills. When he turns the girl is right behind him, gazing up through heavily mascaraed eyelashes. He shoves the money at her without thinking about exchange rates or bus tickets or how he'll pay for dinner.

Her hand whips out, snake-like, and grabs the bills before he can change his mind. Then her lips part slightly, a horrible parody of an alluring simper, and she tilts her head to one side and says, "You take care of me, mister, please?"

Sam hurries away, and he doesn't look back.

-

Nine times he called.

He never thought about the time difference, never thought about what he would say.

He listened through one ring, two rings, three. He waited until he heard, "Hello?"

Then he hung up.

-

He walks until the sun is low in the sky, slanting bright and golden across the city. The streets smell like rotting fish and fruit, like diesel and sweat and urine, and he can feel the hot pavement through the hole in the bottom of his left shoe.

A group of tourists crosses his path; their cameras are stuck to their faces and their guide is speaking into a microphone, holding a yellow paddle high over her head. He mingles with the edge of the group, pretending to listen attentively, picking the pockets of those who look most like they can afford it. When they move on, he walks the other way.

The tourists were smarter then they looked; there is very little cash in the wallets. But it's enough for dinner and a place to sleep. And a phone call.

-

Whenever anybody asked, he said, "Just traveling around, seeing the world."

He had five passports. One of them had his real name on it; he'd gotten it during the summer before his last year at Stanford. Before Jessica died, before Dad vanished, before Dean broke into his apartment in the middle of the night and changed everything. Jess had always wanted to see Paris, and when Sam had taken the application to the post office, he'd been thinking that France was a pretty good place for a honeymoon.

"Just traveling around," he said with a smile, in dozens of cities, on countless roads. "It's a big world out there."

He shared tips and advice, names of places to see and places to avoid. He rode on the tops of the buses and hitchhiked across borders, slept in poppy fields and learned to cuss in thirteen languages. He never refused when anybody offered to buy him a beer.

-

One ring.

_Answer_.

Two rings.

_Answer, goddamnit._

Three rings.

_Don't you dare be--_

"Yeah?"

Low, rough, sleepy. It's the middle of the night in the States. His breath is caught in his chest and he doesn't know what to say.

"Hello?"

More awake now, and a little uncertain. Sam closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the smudged glass of the call box.

"Look, whoever this--"

"Hey." He swallows, clenches and unclenches his fist, clears his throat. "It's me."

There is a long silence. Sam begins to count the drops of water falling on the shop floor, measures his own slow breaths, concentrates on the painful thud of his heart and the sting of his fingernails digging into his palm.

"Where are you?"

He opens his eyes. The shopkeeper is eyeing him suspiciously, his face distorted and obscured by the curling black letters on the glass.

"Thailand. Bangkok. Um, southeast Asia."

"I know where Thailand is."

For a second, just a second, Dean sounds so _annoyed_ that Sam almost smiles. But Dean's voice fades and there's nothing but racket of the street outside and the ache in his chest reminding him to breathe.

Sam inhales slowly and says, "I don't have enough money for a plane ticket home."

Another long silence.

"Okay," Dean says finally. "What do you need?"

When Sam hangs up ten minutes later, his hands are shaking so badly he drops the cash on the floor when he tries to pay the shopkeeper.

-

His jacket was stolen on a train to Venice. He gave up on his second pair of jeans somewhere between Moscow and Dushanbe, sacrificing them to a noble afterlife as patches for the remaining pair. One t-shirt changed from white to gray; the other faded from dark blue to light. Underwear, he realized in the punishing summer heat of Lahore, was entirely overrated. And when monsoon waters washed over his sneakers and submerged his feet to the ankles, he decided that socks were an unnecessary luxury.

Money was easy enough to steal from travelers even more clueless than he was.

He learned to sleep anywhere, in any condition. Cramped train seats, muddy roadside patches, narrow hostel cots surrounded by noisy backpackers, bus stop benches and cool, dewy fields. Sometimes, in the drifting comfort of half-wakefulness, when the first sun touched his skin and the noises of the morning filtered through his muddled mind, he imagined that he could feel an arm across his chest and warm breath on his neck, fingers playing down his back and rough stubble brushing against his cheek.

But he always woke up alone.

And as for the languages -- it soon became obvious that he didn't really have much to say, so he rarely said anything at all.

-

When he steps out of the airport, Dean is leaning against the car with his hands in his pockets, squinting into the sun. He spots Sam immediately, and his expression is perfectly blank.

Sam stops on the curb and waits.

Dean pushes away from the car and takes the keys from his pocket as he walks around to the driver's side. "You hungry?"

His knees ache from too many hours on the plane and his head is humming; he isn't sure what time it is and the mention of food turns his stomach.

But he says, "Yeah, sure," and climbs into the car.

He falls asleep almost immediately.

-

Everywhere he went, he dreamed about people dying.

He saw children screaming in a fiery bus crash; he watched a young man board a crowded train with explosives strapped to his chest; he stood by silently as an old leper starved beside a busy street.

There was no reason to the visions. The deaths weren't supernatural or even very strange. There are demons and monsters and evil all across the world, but the deaths in his dreams were ordinary, natural, dull. Blinding headaches and people dying in mundane ways, that was what he got when he closed his eyes.

A man broke his wife's neck in a rage; a boy was crushed beneath a cart laden with melons; a weeping young woman drowned her newborn daughter and let the tiny body slide into a cool, black, silent river.

They were always strangers. He never recognized who they were or where they died, never knew how to reach them, never knew if it was even possible for him to find them in.

A truck missed a hairpin turn and tumbled down a mountainside like a discarded toy; a blue-faced climber froze to death in a crevasse while the search teams gave up just yards above his head; children with distended bellies and flies on their lips slumped around a muddy waterhole.

He told himself that he would know -- that he would _see_ \-- if something happened, even though he so many miles and continents away. Every time he dialed the number, every time he held his breath and counted the rings and waited, he told himself that he would know.

He hated himself for being relieved every time he watched another stranger die.

-

He wakes with a start when the engine shuts off and the car door slams. Confused, he rubs his eyes and looks around; they're parked in front of a motel. The neon vacancy light casts a red glow on his clothes and skin, and through the window he sees Dean talking to the woman behind the counter. There's a greasy paper bag on the seat beside him: burgers and fries. Sam's stomach rumbles, and he wonders how long he's been asleep.

Dean comes back out to the car, room key in hand, and says, "Two."

When he walks over to the door, Sam sees that there's a patch on the elbow of his leather jacket and duct tape on the heel of his right boot, and he's moving carefully, like he's got a bruised rib or a healing cut he doesn't want to bump.

The room is stuffy, and the first thing Sam does is open the window to let the cool air and road noise in. Dean doesn't say a word; Sam can see the tenseness in his shoulders, the rigid set of his jaw, the whiteness of his knuckles closed around the strap of his bag, but he's too tired and too hungry and too disoriented to break the silence. They sit on separate beds and eat without looking at each other, crinkling the wrappers into tiny balls and wiping greasy fingers on paper napkins, and as soon as he's done Sam lies down and closes his eyes.

He's asleep again within minutes, and he doesn't dream.

-

He didn't even remember what they fought about before he left. They were on separate beds, on opposite sides of the room, and he knew that Dean wasn't asleep when he got up in the middle of the night, stuffed some things into a bag, and crept out, shutting the door silently behind him.

He didn't leave a note.

He knew that Dean would be expecting him to return in a day or so, cooled off and calmed down, ready for things to go back to whatever the hell passed for normal in their fucked-up lives.

He didn't call for a week. When Dean answered, he hung up without saying a word.

After his plane touched down on the other side of the ocean, after he passed through immigration with a fake passport and through customs with a single ratty backpack, the first thing he did was stumble into the men's room and vomit until his stomach was empty and his t-shirt was soaked with sweat.

-

When he wakes for the second time, the night is quiet. There is no more traffic on the road outside, but the motel vacancy light is still shining through the window.

He sits up slowly, his stiff muscles protesting. He rubs his hand over his face, yawns, shivers in the nighttime chill. Dean is asleep on the other bed, lying on his stomach with his face buried in the crook of one arm. Sam watches him for a few moments: the steady motion of each breath, the fold of the blanket across his back, the spiky mess of hair and the gentle red glow on his skin. He wants to jostle the bed, disturb Dean just enough that he moves, turns over, shifts just enough for Sam to see his face.

Instead he stands up and goes into the bathroom, shuts the door quietly before switching on the light. He washes his face with ice-cold water and brushes his teeth with Dean's toothbrush, then leans on the counter and stares at himself in the mirror. His t-shirt has a dark stain down the front from the coffee he spilled when the plane hit some turbulence; he strips it off and drops it on the floor and, Christ, he really needs a few square meals to start looking human again.

Before he can look too closely, Sam kills the light and leaves the bathroom. He has no idea what time it is, but the darkness has the feel of early morning, of the silent, calm stillness that comes just before the world awakens. He crosses the room without pausing, without letting himself think, pulls back the covers on Dean's bed and lies down beside him.

Dean wakes with a start and lifts his head. "What--"

"I'm sorry," Sam whispers. It's stupid, he knows, to do this now, say this now, but he doesn't want to wait. He kisses Dean's arm, the curve of his shoulder, the back of his neck. "I'm sorry," he says again. "I'm sorry. I should have--"

"Sam." Dean's voice is quiet, barely more than a whisper, tense and strained.

For a panicked instant Sam is certain that he's pulling away, but Dean only rolls onto his side to face him. In the faint red light Sam can see the guarded expression his face. It's not forgiveness, not acceptance, not anything that Sam recognizes.

"Jesus Christ, Sammy. You are such a fucking idiot."

And there's real anger in his voice, anger and annoyance and frustration, everything Sam expects -- and like a blurred picture snapping into focus, everything suddenly makes sense again.

When Dean reaches out and brushes Sam's hair back from his face, kisses Sam's forehead and whispers again, "Such a fucking idiot," Sam feels something inside of him unravel, feels the chill of the night slowly seeping away.

He exhales, closes his eyes, rests his head against Dean's chest.

"Yeah," he says, "I know."

"Whole new levels of stupid."

"I know."

"Why anyone ever thought you were the smart one..."

Dean's voice trails off. He's still and quiet for so long that Sam thinks he's fallen back to sleep.

Then: "Did you find it?" The question is a rumble against Sam's ear. He opens his mouth to ask, but Dean goes on, "Whatever the hell you were looking for."

It would be easier to answer, Sam thinks, if the world wasn't so big and so small all at the same time. It would be easier to answer if continents and oceans and journeys without destinations actually meant something, anything, anything more than being lost and alone and cold and wet and scared, more than dreams he couldn't stop and people he wouldn't save, signs he couldn't read and languages he didn't know and roads he never followed.

So he says, "I don't know. Maybe. I think so."

It would be easier to answer, he thinks, if he had ever figured out why he needed to go looking in the first place.


End file.
